Rode Hard, Put Away Dead

by Sinclair Browning

  “I thought these guys were pros.”

  “Oh, they are. I'm not saying that happened in this case, I'm just saying that it's one of the variables. Indifference to a question can even affect things.”

  I couldn't imagine J.B. being indifferent to being asked about his wife's murder.

  “My point, Trade, is that the tests are not infallible. When you're measuring blood pressure, pulse, respiration and electrical conductivity all simultaneously, problems can, and do, occur.”

  “I think I'd better have a talk with J.B.,” I said before hanging up.

  An hour and a half later I was checking into the Pima County jail for the second time in a week. When J.B. appeared in the professional visitor's room this time, he looked even more haggard than he had on my earlier visit.

  He walked in saying, “I didn't do it, Trade. I swear.”

  It was beginning to sound like a mantra.

  “I should have listened to María. She told me not to do it. That it could turn out this way.”

  “Well, she should have figured out that anyone who was stupid enough to get on a pissed-off bull would be stupid enough to try to ride a lie detector test,” I said.

  My feeble attempt at humor brought a slight smile to his face. “At least I'm glad I didn't take one of theirs,” he said, nodding toward the officer behind the window.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “By the way, I'm sorry I missed your call the other day.”

  “I am too. Maybe you could have talked me out of it.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “How's the investigation coming? Have you found out anything that's gonna help me?”

  While I had a lot of suspects, I couldn't in all honesty say that I had, so I just gave a slight nod. “Did you know that Abby was sick?”

  He was startled. “Sick? You mean depressed? She was a little depressed a while back.”

  “But you don't know why?”

  “I just assumed it was some woman thing.”

  Poor thing. Didn't he realize that his bride, thirty-two years older than he, was long past menopause or the normal female mood swings?

  “She was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease.”

  “The baseball guy? What's that?” His face wrinkled in surprise and concern. If he'd known about Abby's sickness, he was doing a great job of covering it up.

  “It's a serious illness, a debilitating one that eventually kills you.”

  It took a minute for this to sink in.

  “Christ.” He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “Why didn't she tell me?”

  “Clarice thinks she would have, she was just trying to figure out how. She was afraid that it would affect your relationship.”

  “Bullshit. I loved her. Why do people keep having trouble with that? Sure, she was a little older than me, but so what? If she'd been twenty-two everyone would have thought that was okay.”

  He was right about that. Unfortunately people aren't as forgiving or as understanding of the May-December thing when it swings the other way. But then, in J.B.'s case, if he'd married someone thirty-two years younger than he, he'd have had a four-year-old for a bride.

  “The guy who diagnosed her was killed the same weekend as Abby,” I said.

  “Dr. Mullon?”

  I nodded. “He was shot in his carport. There might be a connection between that and Abby and her Lou Gehrig's.”

  “What kind of a connection?”

  I shrugged.

  “How long would she have had it?”

  “I don't know. Sometimes loss of hand coordination is one of the first symptoms and she was starting to do that. She was dropping little things at the house and she dropped that bottle at La Gitana.”

  “Yeah, but we'd had a lot to drink that night. That doesn't mean anything.” He was defending her against her illness, even in death.

  “Trust me, J.B., Abby had it.”

  With bowed head, he cradled his thick curly head in his hands. “God, I just don't get it, Trade. I don't get any of it. Why didn't she tell me? Maybe I could have helped her in some way. Didn't she trust me?”

  I thought of his relationship with Jodie Austin and with his ex-wife, Jackie Doo Dahs, but said nothing.

  “J.B., I need to know about the money you gave Jackie.”

  When he looked up, I could see that his eyes were red and tearing.

  “What about it?”

  “How much did you give her and when?”

  He sighed deeply. “God, I don't know. Seems like after Abby and I were married I was always giving Jackie money. A couple of hundred here, a couple of hundred there.”

  “Out of your million?”

  He looked stunned. “You know about that, too?” Jesus. He hires an investigator and then is surprised when he finds out that I'm discovering things about him? Go figure.

  “Yeah, J.B., I'm finding out about a lot of stuff. This would have been easier from the get-go if you'd come clean about a few things.”

  “I know, I know.” He held up his hands. “I'm sorry about that. But I swear I'm not holding anything back now. I can't protect anyone anymore, not Jackie, not myself.”

  “So, how much, J.B.?” I had to know if Jackie Doo Dahs had had the means to pay Gloria.

  I watched his index and middle finger tap the table as he thought about my question. “I don't know, maybe eight, nine thousand dollars. Why?”

  “Gloria has been depositing pretty good chunks of money in a separate bank account. She opened it about three months ago.”

  “How much?”

  “Around twenty-eight thousand dollars as near as we can tell.” It was a far cry from the money he had given his twice ex-wife.

  He whistled. “You think that has something to do with Abby's death?”

  “I don't know,” I said frankly. “I'm checking it out.” We talked for a while longer and I was about to leave when I remembered Stella Ahil and her saguaro harvesting camp.

  “J.B., I've got to ask you again, are you sure that you didn't see anyone in the Baboquivaris either when you were out riding, or Friday or Saturday night?”

  “No, we didn't run into any hikers or riders or anyone like that.”

  “I went back to your camp site and found some people out there harvesting saguaro fruit. I was wondering if they'd been there before.”

  His face lit up. “God, I forgot! We were riding back to the tank on Saturday to water the horses and there was an old beat-up truck, one of those Jap jobs, parked on one of the back roads. We rode right by it and the bed was full of junk—buckets, tarps, that kind of stuff. Maybe it belonged to them.”

  “But you didn't see anyone?”

  He shook his head. “Just a blue truck.”

  Suddenly I knew that I had to talk to Stella Ahil again. Maybe she or her invisible friend had seen something after all.

  39

  AS I LEFT THE JAIL I CAUGHT A BLURB ON THE FRONT PAGE OF the morning paper in one of the machines outside. I plunked coins into the slot and retrieved the newspaper—an extravagance since my Arizona Daily Star was still waiting to be picked up at the end of the lane.

  When I flipped to the Metro section I found Lateef Wise's face staring out at me. He was on the business end of what looked like a chrome-plated shovel, breaking ground for his new day care center. “Heiress' Gift Endows Baby Center” read the headline. Funny he hadn't mentioned the ground breaking yesterday. And during our first meeting hadn't he said he was going to put in the day care center after the estate was settled? Why the rush now?

  There was nothing new in the story, but I had to hand it to Wise to get PR on the back of a dead woman. It seemed too soon after Abby's death to be making any press releases about what her legacy would or would not have endowed. It occurred to me that he had a lot of faith and I wondered how he was financing his construction project until the estate was settled.

  A few minutes later I stopped at a pay phone at a Circle K on Mission Road and waited ten minutes for a stringy-haired y
oung man to finish convincing what I assumed was a young woman on the other end of the line how much he loved her.

  The phone book had been ripped off so I had to call Directory Assistance for the phone number of Baboquivari High School out in Sells. Since Stella Ahil had told me she taught English, I figured she was probably at either the junior high or high school.

  Many of the Tucson schools have gone to a year-round schedule and I was hoping that the Sells high school had followed suit. Unfortunately this was not the case and my quarters went for naught as a recording came on the other end of the line.

  I punched in Charley's number next.

  “Ellis, did you hear—”

  “No jokes. I'm at a pay phone melting. Did you get anything on Stella Ahil yet?”

  “Yes and no.”

  “Great. How about the yes part?”

  “You were right, she teaches English at Baboquivari High, but they're down for the summer. I've got a phone number for her.”

  I scribbled the number down on a corner of the newspaper.

  “But I can't get a twenty on her.” Charley reverted to his old CB jargon, the language he'd spoken before he'd gotten into computers. “She's listed everywhere as a Sells post office box.”

  I groaned.

  “Wait, there's hope,” he chuckled. “I ran the license plate you gave me. The truck belongs to her nephew Benny Francisco, who lives out in Topawa southeast of Sells.”

  “There's good news in all of this, right?”

  He gave me an address and directions that he'd pulled off something called mapquest.com. He says it's not only free but will give you a map and written directions to any location in the country.

  I thanked him and headed back to Priscilla.

  I hung a right at Ajo and headed west, past the saguaro-dotted hillsides of the Tucson Mountain Park and past the turnoff to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, past all the private airplanes at Ryan Field and past Marstellar Road where I frequently team-pen at Bishop's Arena. The saguaros quickly gave way to a grassy plain.

  I finally arrived at Three Points. This time, instead of turning south toward Sasabe I kept straight and drove toward Sells.

  Now the landscape boasted creosote bushes, probably the only desert plant that can survive not years, but decades of drought. The first bush to settle in the desert after the Ice Age, it's not uncommon for a creosote to live for a thousand years. Its longevity is helped, in part, by the fact that its resin does not appeal to cattle so they leave it alone.

  The great white tower of the famed Kitt Peak National Observatory was ahead of me as I drove. After finally convincing the Indians that the facility and its people with the long eyes would not desecrate the sacred peak, the observatory was established in the late 1950s. Situated high in the Quinlan Mountains, it's a great landmark that can be seen from forty miles away.

  The highway was dotted with roadside crosses signifying people who had been killed on the road, an old Mexican custom dating back to the eighteenth century. The crosses, or crucitas, usually made of iron or wood, depending upon the deceased's family members' talents, were dressed with bright plastic flowers. Many were paired with small shrines featuring tall glass religious candles bearing pictures of the Virgin Mary. There were more crosses than I'd ever seen along a single stretch of road before, and in an effort to pass the time more quickly, I began mentally counting them. I was up to ten before I passed the Coyote Convenience Store.

  That I was on the Tohono O'odham Reservation became quickly apparent as I passed turnoffs to places with names like Ali Chuckson, Nawt Vaya, Pan Tak, Haivana Nakya and Chiawuli Tak.

  I drove the speed limit since in spite of the fencing on both sides of the road, there were quite a few thin cattle browsing along the verge.

  When I finally passed the modern Baboquivari High School I had counted thirty-three roadside crosses. A record for me.

  I took the turnoff into Sells, the tribal headquarters and largest town on the Tohono O'odham Reservation. Not exactly a booming metropolis, Sells has grown from a sleepy little Papago village with one of the few reliable water supplies to a town with a modern Basha's supermarket, video rentals and a bank. Papago is still stuck in my brain since they went by that name for hundreds of years until 1986 when they decided that being known as the Bean People wasn't seemly, so the entire tribe opted for a name change to the Tohono O'odham, the Desert People.

  Known for their baskets, the prices of which can range from twenty to hundreds of dollars, the twenty-four thousand Tohono O'odham are a scrappy bunch. With no permanent stream or lake on the reservation, both the people and their cattle have learned how to survive long periods of drought, interrupted only occasionally by the miracles of rain. Their huge desert reservation, encompassing almost three million acres, is second in size only to that of the Navajo.

  Like many tribes, gambling has come to the Tohono O'odham. While it's certainly brought its problems, it's also helped pull the tribe out of bitter poverty. Their Desert Diamond Casino earns close to $80 million a year, some of which is distributed to each of the tribal members.

  Fortunately a farsighted tribal chairman, encouraged by twenty-nine other tribes in the country who have successfully started their own community colleges, managed to earmark some of the casino revenue for such a project. In a few years, the local students won't have to make the long trek into Tucson's Pima Community College. The college will also keep them on the reservation, living comfortably in their own communities.

  I studied the directions that Charley had dictated over the phone and turned left at the road fork a short way out of Sells. Now I was on tribal Highway 19 heading south for Topawa.

  I drove through the small Burro Mountains and then the road became flat, the country stark and bleak, I imagine much the way it has been for thousands of years. These Indian lands are so unattractive that there was never any real threat of anyone else wanting them, so these reservation boundaries weren't even established until this century.

  The people here take advantage of their vast space, and while there are dozens of tiny villages scattered about, there are still some families living in remote outlying areas. I glanced at Charley's directions again, fairly sure that I would find Stella Ahil's nephew living in the general locale of Topawa.

  The vistas are long out here, with the naked eye being stretched for mile after endless mile, the flat desert plains and valleys occasionally broken up by hills and mountain ranges. As I drove, I never lost sight of the towering Baboquivari Peak to the east.

  If I kept on the highway I'd eventually hit the Mexican border, marked by a barbed wire and wooden fence at the San Miguel gate. When the U.S. bought thirty thousand square miles of land from Mexico during the Gadsden Purchase of 1854, no one considered the people living here. The result was that the traditional Tohono O'odham homelands were split, with thirteen hundred of the tribe's members currently living south of the border.

  It's a catch-22, for although members living in Mexico are eligible for tribal benefits—including Indian Health Services—many of them cannot enter Arizona legally since they have no documentation of their birthplace. While tribal members work on getting Congress to authorize passport waivers, the border questioning, hassling and even deportation continue.

  As I drove, I noticed that the Tohono O'odham cattle, never plump to begin with, were painfully thin. The bags, even of those few who had calves by their sides, were shriveled and looked as dry as the land. Out here, in a good year, five to eight inches of rain would fall. This was not a good year. Seeing the cross-bred suffering cattle made me think of my own herd.

  Twenty minutes later I was in Topawa. Besides the large new governmental complex and the tiny post office, the only other building grouping of any note here is the San Solano Mission and a few white stucco and rock buildings clustered around the old church.

  Those mapquest directions were good and I turned right before the mission onto a dusty, rutted road. I drove for a mile or so and t
hen hung another right onto the road where Benny Francisco lived. I drove slowly down the lane, past a few decrepit house trailers with junk-filled yards, rusted cars and faded clothing on the line, past a dead tree that was blooming discarded tires, past a flattened coyote and past two scrawny horses snuffling in the dirt for something to eat.

  Finally I pulled up to a tired gray slump block house, its front yard adorned with a huge wooden play center with a nifty fort on top, swings and a plastic slide. There were a few scattered children's toys in the dirt yard— what looked like an old faded Fisher-Price farm barn, a bald doll missing her left arm, and child-sized Melmac plates and cups along with a huge satellite dish, one of the old kind.

  I was hoping that Benny Francisco, if he was home— his wife if he was not—could tell me where I could find his aunt. She hadn't been exactly forthcoming when I'd seen her in the Baboquivaris so calling her to alert her to my visit was the last thing I wanted to do. Unfortunately, this was my only hope before I'd have to make that phone call.

  I opened the ratty aluminum screen door and knocked on the bleached, blistered wood of the front door. All I could hear as I stood there waiting for someone to answer was the steady hum of the swamp cooler.

  Although my long hair was swept up in a ponytail, it was hotter here than in Tucson or La Cienega and as I stood there, I could feel the sweat begin to pool under my collar. While I'd taken a good swig of water before leaving the truck, my mouth was dry again. It really was too damned hot to be out hunting people in Topawa, Arizona.

  The door opened slowly and as it did I was surprised to find myself facing none other than Stella Ahil. A small toddler-sized child with brown skin and matching eyes was clinging to her baggy cotton shorts.

  “Hello again,” I said, stunned that it would be this easy.

  She squinted, as though she was trying to place me.

  “Trade Ellis. I met you out in the Baboquivaris.”

  “Oh, right.” She didn't sound all that thrilled to see me.

  “I'm wondering if I might talk to you.”